When I read I-Also-Don't-Want-To-Be-Locked-Into-This-Ridiculous-Syntax-Nightmare, bash and sed and cut and the likes indeed are the first things which come to mind. I really feel kind of bad sometimes for once having spent time learning them, only to later find out there are many alternatives and nearly all of them have a shorter learning curve. Many of these tools also have zero discoverability as well, meaning you effectively get locked into learning their syntax. And then another one for the next tool. Whereas at least in PS you can try to use common words and tab completion and sometimes get there before having to reach to 'how do I x in y'.
It's a matter of recognizing your use case. If you're going to write a program that you expect to maintain for years, sure, go ahead and make it as verbose as possible. Unix tools support this with long-form flags (usually prefixed with -- rather than -). On the other hand, if you're doing exploration and iterating interactively on the fly (which bash is best at) then you want very terse syntax to keep lines short.
